E-Safety

With many children spending such a lot of their time playing, learning and communicating with one another on the internet nowadays, it is important for teachers, parents and children themselves to be aware of some of the risks associated with being online. This section of our website is intended to offer up to date advice and helpful resources on a range of e-safety matters including: online bullying; how to use social media safely and responsibly; gaming; and what to do if you see worrying things online.

If you’d like to talk to me or Mrs Mullane about specific concerns, or if there’s something you feel is missing here, please come and have a chat with me in school.

Mr Ellis

As part of the brilliant Thinkuknow website, a series of short films about online safety for younger children has just been launched. Click hereto see all three Jessie and Friends vidoes, aimed at 4 to 7 year olds, along with accompanying free storybooks and ideas to support conversations around online behaviours with that age group.

Parent Zone is a fantastic website featuring regularly updated guides to the latest games and apps that are popular with children and young adults. Their parent guides section might be especially useful for any parents/carers who are not sure about how suitable websites, apps and games might be for the children in their care.

Similarly to Parent Zone, the NSPCC’s Net Aware website features up to date guides to the most popular apps, games and websites, along with well-written, balances articles and ideas for how best to talk to children and young people sensitively about e-safety topics.

Fortnite is an incredibly popular online combat game which can put children at risk from exposure to obscene and violent language and images, as well as grooming. This article has lots of information about the game itself and how potential risks can be minimised.

The fantastic Parent Zone website recently published this excellent article featuring brief, up to date guides to some of the apps that are currently popular with young people. The recent updates to Snapchat (which allow users to see one another’s locations) are also explained in the article, along with some sensible and timely advice on how to talk about traumatic events with young children.

Many apps such as Facebook, Instagram, and Periscope are developing a ‘livestreaming’ function, and this is becoming one of the most popular ways for young people to communicate with one another. While live-streaming can be fun and exciting, young people can be exposed to dangers such as bullying, talking to strangers and seeing inappropriate or upsetting material. The NSPCC’s Net Aware website recently published this article which gives more detail about how this new technology works and some of its associated risks.

Hello Neighbor is a ‘stealth horror game’ which is becoming very popular. The content and gameplay appear to be quite adult in nature. An age rating for the game is unavailable at present, but when I contacted the game’s developers to find out more about it they felt that it would probably be awarded a ‘teen’ rating when it is officially released later in the year. As well as playing the game itself, many children also enjoy watching ‘online walkthrough’ videos on youtube. These videos are home-made clips of someone playing a video game, such as Hello Neighbor or Minecraft, and adding a commentary as they play. The content of these videos, in particular the strong language that often features, is not always suitable for such a young audience.

Roblox is a very popular free game that looks fantastic from a perspective of teaching children basic coding skills, but it also carries some very real drawbacks and dangers. The game is created by its users, meaning that obscene and pornographic images can be posted by anybody with a Roblox account for children to see. Users also report frequent bad language and anti-social, bullying behaviour. It is also associated with computer viruses as children who want to get better at the game are drawn to other websites which claim to give them secret tips or ‘hacks’ to help them advance further, and these websites then install harmful viruses on your home computer or device. Perhaps most worrying though is the game’s chat function: predatory adults are easily able to create accounts and pretend to be children, using the chat fucntion to make contact with and subsequently ‘groom’ young fans of the game. Please talk to your children about whether they use Roblox. Remind them of the need to only accept friend requests from people they know in real life, to never, ever give out personal information about themselves, and to report any images or behaviour to you and the game’s moderators that make them feel uncomfortable.

Musical.ly is a website and app which has been very popular with older Key Stage Two children recently. Users are able to upload videos of themselves singing or miming to pop songs, and it certainly looks like a lot of fun. The idea of sharing these videos with friends and family members seems harmless enough, but what many users do not realise is that, unless the correct settings have been activated, their videos can be seen by anyone with an internet connection. The site has a reputation for being used by predatory adults looking to chat with young children. Please talk to your child about whether they enjoy using this app and help them to ensure that their settings are fully private. Also remind them about the need to only accept friend requests from people that they know in real life.

Many children enjoy using YouTube and some have set up their own YouTube channels to share videos of themselves. Although the age for having a YouTube account is thirteen we know that many younger children know how to get around this. Please talk to your children about whether they enjoy using YouTube and about their privacy settings in particular. This YouTube Parents Guide explains some of the ways in which we can support children to enable them to use YouTube safely.

Pokemon Go is a gaming app that has become incredibly popular overnight. You may have even seen it on the news. The game looks like a lot of fun but comes with some very real safety risks. This document, produced by the NSPCC explains some of the potential risks, and the ways to reduce them, really clearly.

Oovoo, a video chat app, is very popular with teenagers and is becoming more popular amongst older primary-aged children. Find out more about it in this ooVoo guide for parents

AskFM is a social networking site based around users asking one another questions. It has been associated with cyber-bullying. Read more here: AskFM-Online-Safety-Guidance

OurPact is a free parental control app which allows you to control and block the internet and Applications on individual devices in your home, teaching children proper device use and responsibility. The parental control solution gives parents the ability to manage their child’s screen time throughout the day. Parents can enforce bedtime, set dinnertime, manage study time and schedule family time throughout the day. By syncing your family’s iPads, iPhones, and iPods to OurPact, you can have the power to manage your entire family’s screen time & device use under one platform. Please click on attached link for more information: http://ourpact.com/ipad-parental-control-app

It’s Not Okay is a Greater Manchester based organisation working to end child sexual exploitation. Their website contains vital information about this issue including tell-tale signs to look out for and how to report suspicious activity.

Parent Zone and Parent Info are linked websites containing advice for schools and families on a very broad range of e-safety topics. The sites are affiliated with CEOP, the part of the National Crime Agency committed to protecting children, so the advice they offer is very reliable and up to date.